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Being Zen-Buddhist in the Land of Catholicism
Cristina Moreira da Rocha
Introduction
In this century, the West saw a fast expansion of Buddhism, which until then had been
confined to the East. (Dumoulin, 1992: viii) With Buddhism, we see a radically different way
of thinking and seeing the world because it is based on the absence of God and in the idea
that everybody is his own Buddha. Through the practice of meditation, discipline or devotion
(depending on the Buddhist school), anyone may get enlightened and become a Buddha
(literally "an enlightened being"). Moreover, for Buddhism men and nature are part of the
same whole. Nature was not created to serve men as dictates the Christianity. These
elements - the possibility of individual enlightenment, of liberating mind and of union with
nature - had a big appeal and opened the doors for Buddhism to arrive and disseminate itself
in the West through the most varied schools from the whole Asia.
To trace the history of the expansion of Buddhism in the West goes beyond the scope of this
paper, but it is important to relate Buddhism with the Counterculture movement that started in
1950s and its development - the New Age movement - because they are also part of the
history of how Zen Buddhism evolved in Brazil. The beatnik movement opened the doors for
Zen Buddhism in the United States. The beats saw in Zen's plea for unattachment to worldly
things the answer to their rebellion against the consumerism of the post World War II. Jack
Kerouac, one of the movement's main spokesperson, predicted a "rucksack revolution",
where young Americans would leave the production and consumption society and would
meditate in the mountains. In his book the Dharma1 Bumsof 1957, Kerouc wrote: "What we
need is a floating zendo2, where an old Boddhisattva can mush (Tricycle, 1995: 73)." The
possibility of freeing the mind as taught by Zen Buddhism was confused with freedom from
social convention (Tworkov, 1989: 7). Zen boom flourished among artists and intellectuals in
1 Word originated of dharman, which appears in the Vedas and has the sense of decree, law, practice,
obligation, morality and religion. Buddhism uses dharma meaning Buddha's law or teaching (Tricycle magazine,
1997: 63).
2 Zen Hall, that is, Zen meditation room.
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late 1950s. Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki were the ones who popularized Zen through their
books written on it for a Western audience.
According Robert Bellah Zen Buddhism was a new trend as the religion of Counterculture:
"(...) The biblical arrogance in relation to nature and the Christian hostility to the impulsive life
were both, strange to the new spiritual atmosphere. Thus, the religion of the counterculture
was not, in general, biblical. It was drawn from several sources, including the one of the
American Indians. Its deeper influences, however, came from Asia. In the several ways, the
Asian spirituality offered a more complete contrast to the rejected utilitarian individualism than
the biblical religion. To the external accomplishment, it opposed the inner experience, to the
exploitation of nature, harmony with nature; to the impersonal organization, an intense
relationship with the guru. The Mahayana Buddhism, above all under the form of the Zen,
supplied the more penetrating religious influence to the counterculture (Bellah, 1986: 26)."
Indeed, from the 50s on, people in the West were in search of other forms of spirituality out of
Western canons, as the Catholic or Protestant religions. People started seeking holistic
movements that are characterized by symbols attached to nature, to the idea of healing the
planet and the individual3. Hence, a way of life which integrates man and nature. As Bellah
mentioned above, Eastern religions answered to that search. The idea that a new lifestyle,
which included meditation and a connection with the sacredness would bring health and
happiness paved the way for the popularization of several Buddhist sects, among them Zen.
It is in the wake of the movement, which began with the Counterculture and is now called
New Age, that we can understand how centers that work with healing practices, be it
shamanic, of the past lives, of the astral body, phytotherapeutic, tai-chi-tchuan, acupuncture,
energetic massage are associated to self-help, spiritual and of angelic wisdom books (The
Happiness of Discovering Guarding Angels in Our Lives, by Sara Marriott), scientific books
(The Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra) and medical books (The Quantum Healing, by Deepak
Chopra) in the construction of a new lifestyle4.
3 "Disease is lack of harmony, it is opposed to healing, which is the way to the psychophysical (physical body),
psychological (emotions and feelings) and psychospiritual (subtle energy) liberation. The path to healing has as a
goal health, that is, enlightenment. The way to transform disease into health is the spiritual practices, purification
and accumulation of merit and wisdom (through virtuous actions). The Buddhist body is a healthy and
enlightened body (Lama Shakya in a workshop in São Paulo, 1996)".
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Japanese Buddhist, Zen Buddhist, Tibetan, Korean and Sri Lanka monks are increasingly
present in the city of São Paulo. Dharma Centers (Buddhist centers managed by Brazilians)
bring their spiritual mentors from abroad (in general twice a year) so that they can give
workshops, promote spiritual retreats and disseminate their teachings. Many followers
undertake trips to the centers, which originated the religion, being they in the United States,
Japan, India or in Nepal. These Dharma Centers spread in the city help to disseminate this
new holistic view of life. The city of São Paulo is getting organized in a new circuit, where
practitioners travel to well-known places and share the same lifestyle. However, not only in
the city of São Paulo there is a circuit centers of Eastern religions, which many of the
followers of the Zen Buddhism belong to, but São Paulo itself is part of the circuit of the
metropolises that shelter these centers. Indeed, having branches in many countries, the
spiritual mentors travel the world giving lectures, workshops and making retreats.
The metropolis propitiates the spiritual encounter with the East due to the easiness to obtain
and to exchange information through mass communication, and due to the interest of the
middle and upper middle classes who inhabit neighborhoods which thoroughly provide
services and urban facilities that characterize a cosmopolitan religious practice (Magnani,
1996b: 11)5.
If in the United States the movement of the Counterculture of the 50s and 60s helped the
popularization of Zen Buddhism among Americans of non-Japanese origin, in Brazil, its
arrival was due more to its connection with the Japanese-Brazilian community than to a
search for inner spirituality. However, even if in the midst of Counterculture and New Age
trends Brazilian intellectuals of non-Japanese origin interested in Zen Buddhism in the 60s, it
was only popularized among the Brazilians in the end of the 70s (Paranhos, 1994).
4 The growing demand for a non-rational knowledge of life can be seeing in the recent creation of a list just for
"esoteric and self-help" books, besides the traditional "fiction" and "non-fiction" in Brazilian magazines and
shelves for such category of books is Brazilian bookstores.
5 "(…) The progressive construction - instead of a plunge in the tradition - of sincretic systems, more and more
spiraled (…) which are supported by a religious culture in constant enlarging movement. That is: through the
process of massive diffusion, since a kind of universal religious culture is more accessible to everyone, and it is
build from standard information of how the religions of the world were - of the Aztecs, Incas, Chinese, Japanese,
Indians, etc. Everything is molded in a kind of religious common knowledge, which emerges as 'pantraditional' or
cosmopolitan (…) (Carvalho, 1992: 153)".
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Zen Buddhism in Brazil
There are three schools of Zen Buddhism in Japan (Sôtô, Rinzai and Obaku). Sôtô Zenshu
School6 is the one that was spread to the West and to Brazil. Sôtô Zenshû privileges
meditation (zazen) as a practice for enlightenment.
Zen was first introduced by the Japanese immigrants in 1950s in the State of São Paulo. The
aspects of Zen emphasized were devotional practices, "masses" (as Japanese-Brazilians call
the rituals denoting the influence of the Catholic environment) and funeral rituals. This
population sought (and still does) the temples to perform Buddhist rituals that besides
attending to the immigrants' religious needs, also assist in the affirmation of their ethnic
identity.
It is well known that the identity of a group is built in relation to other group. As states the
Anthropologist Eunice Durham:
"The concept of ethnic identity, as a contrastive group identity, it is built in the context of the
concrete intergroup relationships and conflicts (Durham, 1986: 32)."
Conflicts emerge when this ethnic identity is under threat, that is when immigrants feel that
Brazilians of non-Japanese origin are using the same values (in this case Zen Buddhism) to
identify themselves as a group. It is in this context that one can understand the coming up of
the issue of which group (Japanese immigrants and descendants or Brazilian of nonJapanese ancestry) has the "true" ancestors' culture (Oliveira, 1976: 5; Reis, 1993: 77;
Rocha, 1996: 30, 86-99). Here there is a conflict of motivations, practices and aspirations
similar (but in a smaller extent) to the North-American one. In the US, there is a conflict
between what is called "white Buddhism" practiced by the white upper-middle-class and
upper-classes that praises meditation as a path to enlightenment, and the so called "ethnic
Buddhism", of the immigrants, which is basically devotional and oriented to the community
(Nattier, 1995: 42-49; Fields, 1994: 54-56; Foye,1994: 57; Prebish 1991,1998,1999).
6 Sôtô is the Zen Buddhist sect brought to Japan by the Japanese monk Dôgen (1200-1253) after a trip to China.
Zen is the Japanese word that corresponds to dhyâna in Sanskrit and ch'anin Chinese. It means concentration or
meditation, that is, Mahayana Buddhist meditation. Mahayana is what is called the great vehicle and it developed
in China, Korea and Japan as opposed to Hinayana, or small vehicle, which developed in Sri Lanka, Thailand
and Cambodia. Japanese Zen Buddhism is the result of an amalgam of Indian Buddhism and Chinese Taoism
and its introduction in Japan. Zen Buddhism values the direct and personal experience instead of intellectual and
rational speculation and worship of images. This differentiates it from traditional Buddhism. Hence, meditation
(zazen) and paradoxical thought in the form of koan (questions without a rational logic) play a fundamental role in
the transmission of knowledge (Dumoulin, 1992).
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Brazilians of non-Japanese ancestry are involved in Zen Buddhism for reasons which mainly
have to do with the experience of living in an urban environment and the New Age movement
trends. On the overall, according to interviews, they are interested in Zen Buddhism as way of
acquiring inner peace, getting rid of the stress of the metropolis, learning about Japan or
acquiring a spiritual practice. Even in the rural areas, the practitioners' population comes from
the cities and seeks the monasteries to live Zen Buddhism more intensely, in retreats
(sesshin) of four to seven days or of three months (angô), or even to reside in the places as a
life alternative. In this context, it is the city, and not the identity, that should be associated to
the way as the Zen Buddhism is appropriated in Brazil.
However, departing from that conflict between immigrants and non-Japanese descendants,
one can extend other nets, among the Zen Buddhist practitioners, which cover several points
of Brazil where there are other ways of being a practitioner. In 1985, the Center of Buddhist
Studies (CEB) was created in Porto Alegre (capital of Rio Grande do Sul State). It included
practitioners of several Buddhist schools. In 1989, the Japanese monk Ryotan Tokuda
inaugurated, in the same city, the temple Sôtô Zen Sanguen Dojô, which focused exclusively
on Zen Buddhism. As the Japanese-Brazilian community does not exist in Porto Alegre,
practitioners are basically Brazilians of non-Japanese origin. Therefore, there is emphasis in
the practices of daily meditation, retreats and studies of the dharma (Buddha's teachings),
and there is an absence of rituals and funerals performed.
The Zen Buddhist Sôtô monasteries7 of Morro da Vargem, in Ibiraçú, in the State of Espírito
Santo, and the one of the Pico dos Raios, in Ouro Preto, in the State of Minas Gerais, were
established respectively in 1977 and in 1985 by the Japanese monk Tokuda. Today they are
already managed by Brazilians of non-Japanese origin, who were disciples of Tokuda and
studied in monasteries in Japan. According to the Brazilian magazine Isto é: "the Zen
monastery Morro da Vargem is visited annually by four thousand people and receives seven
thousand children of the State, who go there to learn environmental education" (Isto é,
03/12/97: 62). Besides maintaining an ecological reserve and the Center of Environmental
Education since 1985 (Paranhos, 1994: 151), the monastery owns a "House of Culture" to
7 The organization of monasteries is different from that of temples. In the former the practitioners reside and
have their lives ruled by the monasteries' ways. Monasteries are training centers for monks and nuns. In the
temples the practitioners participate in their activities without dedicating themselves entirely to them because they
still keep their profession and personal lives.
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receive fine artists that, away from the city, can be devoted to creation. The monastery Pico
dos Raios has also a link with the external community - monk Tokuda teaches the Chinese
technique of acupuncture to its practitioners, who offer this service to the local population.
These monasteries are part of the circuit of those that, coming from the city, share the same
interest in the oriental religions and meditation, whether they are converted Zen Buddhists or
just "sympathizers".
Buddhism and New Patterns of Behaviour in Brazil
Currently, the interviews with practitioners show that, for Brazilian of non-Japanese ancestry,
the interest in Zen Buddhism happens via the United States, through the media8, books on
Zen, movies9 and trips. In fact, all of the people interviewed described their first contact with
Zen through books. The United States is a strong source of material and ideas on Zen for
various reasons. One of them being that the English language is more accessible to
Brazilians than Japanese. In fact, most of the books on Zen, which are translated to
Portuguese, were in English originally. Moreover, due to the fact that the practitioners
interviewed come from the intellectual upper-middle class and the vast majority is of
university graduate liberal professionals, many of them can read the books in English before
they are translated. Some practitioners even choose to do retreats in North-American Zen
Centers. Here are some reasons practitioner gave for their interest in American Zen:
"In San Francisco I felt Zen is more incorporated into US culture [than in Brazil]. There the
abbot is a whole unit, it seems that Zen is already blended in his personality, emotion, action,
intellect, in his whole being. So much so that the lectures aren't on classical texts. There [in
the US], the monks are American and the community is already 40 years old. So they have a
local color, the main core of Zen was preserved, but it is not so much Japanese.
"After I arrived home from a sesshin [retreat], I looked up a book about the experience of
zazen by an American nun, Charlotte Joko Becker. Her talks with her disciples were
published in two volumes. She is also a Westerner, so she understands well what goes on in
8 The word Zen is fashionable in the West: one sees Zen perfume, shops, beauty parlors, restaurants, magazine
articles and architecture. It is also in everyday conversation as a synonym of inner tranquility and inner peace.
9 The recent Hollywood movies "The Little Buddha", "Seven Years in Tibet" and "Kundun" were very successful
in Brazil.
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the mind of a Westerner who embraced Zen Buddhism. She speaks as we do; we
understand very well what she says about the psychic processes, about the psychology of a
Western person, in this case of a Brazilian person. I really didn't feel any difference. The
American style of Zen is closer to ours."
"I think the Americans and Brazilians have a similar language to talk about Zen."
Dwelling in the cities, these practitioners seek to relieve stress and to acquire inner peace. As
some practitioners opine:
"I went through various other practices before I found Zen. Zen answered my needs of
harmonization. Because my job is very stressful and I have to deal with a lot of people, I need
harmony in everyday life. Life in big cities is very stressful."
"I became more careful since I started studying Zen. Also my anxiety has diminished with Zen
practice. I find more satisfaction in what I am living now. Zen practice is this tranquility, this
fruition of what I am living in the present moment."
The vast majority of the interviewed people were Catholics before starting to "shop around" in
the religious marketplace and find Zen Buddhism. Adherents who left Catholicism and are
studying Zen Buddhism explain their disenchantment with Catholicism in various ways, such
as its dogmatism, its separation from daily life and its problems, its hierarchical organization,
its way of dealing with nature and its almighty God. Looking for an alternative, Catholic
adherents try to compose their symbolic universe with something that they can construct by
themselves in daily life. Similarly, they praise the authority of the individual to interpret the
scriptures and the possibility of practicing mindfulness in daily life, outside the temple, which
according to them is present in Zen. Three different practitioners asserted these qualities of
Zen when interviewed:
"I have a Catholic background; I used to go to Church till first communion. You go more
because of your parents' influence. But after that never more… because the Catholic Church
is very dissociated from daily life. I guess that's why Zen is so interesting. Christianity is too
separated from reality. Zen is not; it is a very practical thing, very down to earth on how to
face difficulties. Its pragmatism attracted me."
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"[In Zen] I don't need an interpretation; I don't need hermeneutics, somebody telling me which
is the correct way. It is Zen itself that says: 'Don't let the sûtra command you, you must be in
command'."
"What called my attention to Zen was mainly its simplicity. Zen is very much this experience
of meditation, it's to practice and observe what happens in your daily life. Zen does not make
this separation, as the majority of other religions do, between the religious place, where you
practice (the temple, the church), and your normal, daily life. Zen puts these two things
together. The practice is not only when you do zazen [meditation], but also it is something
you'll practice in your daily life."
The close relationship between Buddhism and the ecological movement as opposed to the
Catholic way of approaching nature is mentioned by a practitioner to explain her religious
choice:
"Buddhism has a distinctive trait if compared to Christianity. For Buddhism there is life in all
the elements of nature besides men themselves. There is life in the plants, rocks, mountains,
and water, in everything. But in Christianity things are different. I realized this reading the
Genesis, which deals with creation. God creating things and so on. Then it says God created
the animals to serve men. That shocked me. Men took their ethnocentrism too far. Men
subjugated animals and plants. Today we are watching the destruction of the planet. (…)
Buddhism has a different way of approaching this problem. And this is fundamental for me.
To integrate nature is for me a spirituality which has to do with my life story."
Furthermore, Zen Quarterly, a magazine published by the Sôtô School of Zen Buddhism in
Japan also deals frequently with the ecological issue in its articles:
"As we approach the 21st century with the mindfulness of compassion and non-violence, our
Buddhist challenge is to cultivate the Buddhist teachings that will stop the crimes against the
environment and will reform our money-oriented world (Okumura: 1998: 01)."
Various studies have shown that privatization of religious conviction is a characteristic of
modernity, that is, religion has become a matter of private choice and not of tradition or social
pressure (Dumont, 1985: 240; Hefner, 1998: 87; Berger, 1974). Following this trend, througha
process of bricolage10, the practitioner chooses characteristics from different practices to
10 In the concept of 'bricoleur' created by Claude Lévi-Strauss in La Pensée Sauvage.
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condense them into a spiritual quest. This mixture of various traditions in order to build a new
contemporary spirituality is, according to the French Anthropologist Marc Augé, a
characteristic of supermodernity:
" In the situations of supermodernity (as in those Anthropology has called 'acculturation'), the
components are added without destroying each other (Augé, 1994: 42)."
The anthropologist Louis Dumont, in his book Individualism (1985), dealt specifically with the
idea of spirituality of the contemporary world, where the religious practice is a choice of
private forum, since "The dimension of value, which until then had been projected
spontaneously in the world, was restricted to what is for us, its only true domain, that is to
say, the spirit, the feeling and man's volition (Dumont, 1985:240)."
Therefore, each practitioner constructs his/her religion as a unique praxis, different from all
the others by mixing various traditions in order to build a new contemporary spirituality. As
two practitioners told me:
"I don't think there is only one line of thinking. Only one line of thinking can't supply all your
needs. You have to pick some things that have to do with you, and if you think that something
is too radical to one side, you should look for something on the other side. I think you will end
up disappointed if you pick only one thing. … There's a word nowadays that has everything to
do with the end of the millennium, when you stop following only one thing, it is 'holism'. I don't
care much for strict lines of reasoning. I think you have to get the whole, the essence,
because everything is basically the same, all these practices say similar things."
"Meditation can be a holistic practice too. It will never be an affiliation, an exclusive form of
work or technique. I'll never do this again in my life. I want to stay absolutely free. The
moment we live decides which practice we should do. I think we have to be open to the
different praxes, which are offered to us. I like to have a plurality of instruments at hand.
There are several groups of practices, associated with Zen Buddhism, which are recurrent in
the interviews: practices of healing (Yoga, Shiatsu, Do In, Tai Chi Chuan, Acupuncture),
practices of self-understanding (many kinds of psychotherapy, Astrology), martial arts (Aikido,
Karate), eating habits (vegetarianism, macrobiotics) and other religions (Spiritualism, African
religions, Mahikari, Rajneesh/Osho).
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This approach to religious practice is justified using the Zen Buddhist idea on nonattachment. According to Buddhism, what causes people to suffer is their attachment to
things and their lack of understanding that everything is impermanent. This ignorance of
impermanence creates the expectation things will be the same. There is a famous Zen
saying: "If you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha", meaning you should not get attached to the
idea of Buddha, but practice it. This is interpreted, by practitioners, as the impossibility of one
religion being the permanent answer to your spiritual needs. For instance, one practitioner
praises Zen Buddhism as a religion that does not request loyalty:
"You have to keep picking the little things you believe in and they will work for you as a step
to go further. So, you will leave things behind when you have no use for them anymore. You
shouldn't say 'I believe in this….' It's funny because the monk himself said this. 'You cannot
get attached to Zen Buddhism'".
That is probably why being a regular practitioner in one place does not stop someone from
doing the same in another. It is usual that the same person participates of meditations in a
Center of Tibetan Buddhism, and, at the same time, goes to a Japanese Zen center and
even is ordained lay monk, receiving a Zen name (Paranhos, 1994: 155). In the same way, a
person can participate in Tibetan, Theravada Buddhism or Zen retreats, indifferently.
"I regularly go to the Zen meditations at the temple and to Tibetan meetings at the Gompa11.
You see, Zen Buddhism gives me peace and quiet, but doesn't answer to my needs of
ritualism. I am a lay nun in both places so I have a Zen name and a Tibetan name."
Most of the adherents do not go as far as having two Buddhist names, but many do frequent
several Buddhist schools or other religious institutions at the same time or subsequently, as a
quest for the religion which best answers one's needs. According to a Brazilian lay ordained
practitioner who works in the Temple in São Paulo, many of the practitioners that come to
meditate for the first time are going through a difficult moment in their lives.
"When a new practitioner arrives here, he/she is usually going through a difficult moment, a
crucial moment … His/Her cultural background is Western, it is Christian or Jewish, hence
very close to the concept of miracle. When you are emotionally sick, you go to a hospital, you
go to a Candomblé, Umbanda [Afro-Brazilian religions], to a priest or to a temple. This works
11 Tibetan temple.
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as an anesthetic, it calms you down. … People arrive at the temple hoping to find the answer
to their troubles here. But when they sit to meditate hoping for tranquility (this is their goal),
everything starts to hurt, the whole body starts to hurt … and then the mind is in pain too.
There are people who don't want to know about this. They are afraid, they are looking for a
miracle, and they don't want to see the horror of their troubles. Sometimes people leave the
temple very upset. Their idea of meditation is of being in heaven. Only one out of ten people
who come here for the first time end up staying."
As we can see, this lay ordained practitioner mentions another characteristic of the
population who seeks Zen Buddhism - they are in search of their "inner self". Many
practitioners mentioned doing various kinds of psychotherapy and equaled it with Zen as a
way of getting in touch with the "inner-self".
"Self-understanding is one of the main things I look for in zazen.".
"I did group therapy. It's a therapy called somatherapy developed by Roberto Freire in Belo
Horizonte. It helped me develop myself. Now my Zen practice is helping me"
Zen Buddhism becomes an activity made in leisure moments when we see practitioners
exchanging the spree of carnival for retreats (sesshin)12, and movie nights or free weekends
for meditation sessions with their sangha (meditation group). The consumption of goods is
easily identifiable in the sales of books, magazines13, courses, retreats, clothes and utensils
adapted for meditation, as if satori (enlightenment) itself were possible to be reached as you
acquire merchandise.
"(...) Samadi, enlightenment, satori appear now also as a fetish, almost as a commercial
exhibition, as image of power, as merchandise. The possibility of a trance, of a touch of
energy, of a hug of divine love, etc., is so desired in the present social context as the
acquisition of a car, of an appliance, of a trip to a famous place. The religious advertisement
(...) has already incorporated, as any other advertisement of the consumption society, the
mimetic desire of ownership (Carvalho, 1992: 153)."
12 "It was Carnival and I was going to Bahia and saw the sign for the Monastery on the road. I felt an irresistible
attraction, 'you have to go, you have to go'. It was like a call".
13 There are four magazines published quarterly in Brazil. Two of them are exclusively Zen Buddhist: "Flor do
Vazio" is published in Rio de Janeiro, "Caminho Zen" is published in Japan by the Soto School in Portuguese for
the Brazilian market. "Bodigaya" and "Bodisatva" are two Buddhist magazines which comprise articles mainly on
Zen and Tibetan Buddhism.
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The Western religious field incorporates a holistic view of the individual that is opposed to the
fragmentation of the modern societies. This problematic is characteristically Western and
through it one can understand the appeal Zen Buddhism has to Westerners.
Conclusion
It becomes stimulating to map the population that practices Zen in Brazil, to focus its
aspirations, motivations and lifestyle when one thinks it is inserted in a movement that
characterizes not only the contemporary spirituality, but, also a lifestyle.
As we saw in this article, it is a characteristic of people in modern urban society to shun the
idea of a religious institution, which is organized in a hierarchy and has dogmas to instruct
people how to behave and what to believe. All the people interviewed made a point of
choosing attributes of different religions and constructing their own, as a "bricoleur" would do.
Each person had an idea of sacredness, which was constructed by him/her. The central
practice of Zen Buddhism, meditation (zazen), is seeing as an individual practice and,
enlightenment (satori), its consequence, is taken as a result of individual effort. Zen
Buddhism is chosen because it is a simple religion, that is, it has no dogmas and it is
connected to everyday life of practitioners.
In Brazil, Zen temples and monasteries are located as much in the cities as in rural areas, in
each place with a different function. In the cities they assist, in first place, the Japanese
immigrant population (as we saw in the case of the Japanese-Brazilian community in São
Paulo) as they help in the affirmation of their ethnic identity.
Besides the immigrant community in search of its identity, in the Brazilian metropolises Zen
Buddhist temples are frequented by people that seek them precisely for the problems
generated in the urban life (stress, search of peacefulness, self-understanding, silence and of
a more spiritual life) and for the need of a new spirituality based on integration with nature
and self-understanding.
Bibliography
AUGÉ, Marc, 1994, Não Lugares: Introdução a uma antropologia da supermodernidade. São
Paulo, Papirus.
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